Welcome to the Voter Forums Project!

Democracy must become a continuing conversation, not just an occasional interview.

The Voter Forums project seeks to make it commonplace that politicians and their constituents have frequent and substantive conversations about the issues.

Help us do this by participating in a new, non-partisan, online ‘Voter Forum’ tradition!

Voter Forums take place within Facebook, and indeed are similar to Facebook Q&As and Chats with the main differences being that they emphasize text dialogue and they are not ‘Live’. They work like this:

Voters pose questions to incumbent Representatives and Candidates. This is most easily done via Facebook (example), but Twitter (example) or any other method can also be used.

Other voters demonstrate their interest in a particular question with ‘Likes’.

Politicians answer the questions they wish to address, when they have an opportunity to do so, at the Facebook Group page (example).

Question posting privileges at a specific Voter Forum are limited to district residents. This restriction focuses the questions and helps with these project goals:

Politicians learn about district concerns via substantive online conversations with constituents who have a wide variety of differences in political views.

Voters likewise learn from politicians who are willing to explain their thinking and actions in depth.

Importantly, Voter Forums can be used to explore the new frontier of conversational democracy. When a question topic is complex, and a back-and-forth discussion is needed to meaningfully address the issues raised, the politician and questioner can have a one-on-one, private discussion via e-mail or Messenger. After completion, this conversation can be posted at the Facebook Group page so all can benefit from it.

Facebook is very widely used, but its ‘feed’ structure makes the platform a poor choice to archive a database of politician-voter engagements. To improve Voter Forums' organization and impact, Facebook posts are mirrored outside of Facebook (example) and also catalogued in an easy-to-follow Google SpreadSheet (example).

A Voter Forum is a non-partisan, on-going, online townhall for direct conversations between politicians and their constituents.

Voter Forums are organized and conducted mainly within Facebook (example), but their content is mirrored at a non-Facebook website (example) for SEO purposes, and is catalogued at a Google Sheet (example).

What is new about Voter Forums?

Actually, not much! The three main elements:

politicians directly participate,

at a non-partisan platform, and

engage in dialogue with constituents in addition to Q&A,

are not uncommon although combining all three elements is new.

A little history: politicians have been experimenting with (1) direct online participation since the early 90’s, with Vice President Al Gore’s 1994 ‘interactive townhall’ being a notable early example.

Likewise, there has long been experimentation with (3) online dialogue, mainly on partisan forums associated with US campaigns. The 2004 Howard Dean campaign for President, managed by Joe Trippi, was a pioneer here.

Unfortunately, e-democracy innovation was then largely neglected by U.S. politicians until the 2016 Trump campaign:

Trump received tremendous gains, at zero financial cost, through direct participation (1) on the non-partisan (2) Twitter platform. However he did not innovate with dialogue (3), unsurprisingly since conversational democracy is completely antithetical to his style as a politician.

What is the main goal of a Voter Forum?

Creating well-informed ‘policy voters’ out of disengaged ‘identity voters’ is the central goal of the Voter Forums project. We believe that if we create easily-found sources of easily-followed conversations about policy, this will slowly but surely help citizens begin to factor policy more into their voting decisions.

If we succeed even modestly in this goal, then Voter Forums should have a significant impact on the quality of public policy discourse, and the results of close elections.

There are over 100 million Facebook pages, why would anyone notice Voter Forum Groups?

Search engine results are one way to attract readers. Facebook is rather unfriendly to search engine index bots, but Voter Forum conversations mirrored on the central website will have high rankings on Google searches because there are so few in-depth discussions focused around electoral districts out there.

Of course, only ‘policy voters’ actively seek out information about issues. We also need to get on the radar of the ~85% who are mainly ‘identity voters’. To do this we will (among other things) encourage social media sharing by policy voters.

Why limit question posting and conversation privileges to residents of the relevant district?

Because Voter Forums have a focus on the shared geography and localized politics of the district. And very importantly: readers of the forum care a lot about the opinions of their neighbors; they (appropriately) care much less about the views of non-residents.

Why use forum moderation to enforce a civil atmosphere and require substantive posts?

To prevent the Voter Forum from filling up with lightweight and borderline-insulting posts from ‘identity voters,’ such as this real life example:

Posts like these would be taken down and the poster gently admonished to make more civil and substantive contributions in the future.

Can staffers speak for politicians at a Voter Forum?

No politician writes all of their public speeches nowadays, and there would be no expectation that politicians personally compose all of what they post in a Voter Forum. However they are expected to be intimately aware of, and to take responsibility for, anything they have had posted in their name.

Staffers are welcome to directly engage with constituents in a Voter Forum as long as they identify themselves and their role. The all-too-common social media practice, of staffers tacitly fostering the illusion that their politician employer writes all posts, is dishonest.

Given how common bot and troll accounts are, how can one certify that a Facebook account belongs to a district resident?

If the account user supplies their (1) name, (2) date of birth, and (3) county where they live to the Facebook Group admin, this information can used to verify online that this person is on the voting rolls (at least in PA and many other states).

Very usefully, the information needed is not very sensitive. Providing false information is not likely given that doing this is criminalized as identity theft, but if doubts arise admins can look at the posts made from the account to verify that they are consistent with district residence.

What is the ‘conversational democracy’ movement and how is it related to the Voter Forum concept?

There has been a huge amount of e-democracy activity - theory, observation and experiments - in the last two decades. Some of this makes the case for online innovation towards a more ‘conversational democracy’, and these works in particular have helped shape the Voter Forums project.

Two of the most relevant publications are freely available to read online:

Extending the Public Sphere through Cyberspace: The Case of Minnesota E-Democracy, by Lincoln Dahlberg (2001, html)

More information about conversational democracy and Voter Forums can be read here. This presentation additionally covers the motivation for the project, provides some history of related ‘digital democracy’ projects, and addresses some obvious criticisms.

Who makes up the Voter Forums project, and why are they working to set up Voter Forums?

The project leader is Travis Mitchell, a research scientist who resides in SE Pennsylvania.

The Voter Forums project is non-partisan, non-profit and grassroots-run. We are working on it because we strongly believe that non-partisan platforms for voters to meaningfully interact with politicians are an important public good. Making online Voter Forums available and easy-to-access should eventually result in our political leaders becoming more responsive to the concerns of non-wealthy yet well-informed voters.